IBM Bridges Server Consolidation and Carbon Markets

Last week, IBM
announced a program that will make it possible for its customers to document
server energy savings and trade them on one of the emerging carbon trading markets.

Today, you can consolidate applications running on multiple servers onto a
mainframe, have the energy savings documented as carbon credits, then trade
those carbon credits for cash or other consideration on a carbon trading market.
The certificates can be issued for each year of the life of the project.

The program is currently available only for IBM's mainframes, but the company
plans to extend it to all of its server lines and as storage systems. This provides
flexibility well beyond the mainframe, which few of us are likely to upgrade
to.

Does documenting and trading carbon credits make server consolidation more
attractive to you? Send me your thoughts to pvarhol@redmondmag.com.